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04.09.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Ben Peterson’s “Nebraska”

On this site, we don't tend to feature exhibitions once they've already closed, but this one retains one of the most incredible visual archives we've seen to date, a record of objects that were as beautifully displayed as they were constructed. Ben Peterson's "Nebraska," which was on view at San Francisco's Ratio 3 gallery from January 17 to February 28, featured a series of architectural ceramic sculptures by the Oakland-based artist, painted in different, natural hues to erase traces of their clay past and to resemble something more like weathered and patinated concrete. Almost Brutalist in form, the sculptures were installed on site-specific pastel plinths, an extreme juxtaposition that somehow seemed just right.
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04.07.15

Sighted

Forma Anticum

Part of the joy we take in creating content for Sight Unseen every day is the delight we get from telling the stories behind the makers and the images we publish. But what happens when there is literally no story to be found? That's exactly the position we found ourselves in the other day when we stumbled across these images on Pinterest.
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03.28.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 23, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two amazing but different geometric mirrors (including this beach house–ready one by Alex Drew & No One), a digitally rendered interior that has us ready to move in, and vintage napkin rings that look like cool-girl jewelry — by none other than Nathalie du Pasquier.
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03.25.15

Up and Coming

Jacqueline Klassen, Ceramicist

Jacqueline Klassen didn’t grow up around design; her father was a therapist and her mom a case management worker, and their family’s greatest joy was good food. She didn’t study it either; she holds an undergraduate degree in English literature and was often told, “Go to school! You’d be a great teacher!” But rather than teach, Klassen instead signed up for more classes herself — only this time it was a six-week course in ceramics. “I immediately was in love,” Klassen remembers. “I was always grasping for something that would be a good fit for me; I was trying to make something work, but I hadn’t yet found it.” Over the next year, she toyed with the idea of going to grad school for art history. But when she found herself in the studio, at the wheel more often than not, it became apparent that perhaps she should listen to her gut.
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03.20.15

Shopping

In a Philly Photographer’s Hands, Photos That Look Like Digital Collages

We've been familiar with Philadelphia-based photographer Roxana Azar's work for some time now (last summer, she took the snaps for our story on fellow Philadelphian Page Neal of Bario-Neal (where Azar also works). But the second she sent us the latest personal series she's been working on, we knew we had to share. Azar digitally manipulates her photos to make them almost painterly or collage-like, but in the series we're sharing today, many of the images began as photographs from gardens where Azar spent her childhood. "I am really interested in using the photograph as a starting point to layer, erase, rebuild, and obscure an image, turning the image into something ambiguous yet playful," Azar says.
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03.16.15

Sighted

Jesse Moretti Editions for Little Paper Planes

We've been huge fans of Cranbrook grad Jesse Moretti's work ever since her solo show at Patrick Parrish gallery (then Mondo Cane), way back in 2013. There's something about the palette Moretti uses, the saturated gradients she employs, and the way she zigzags back and forth between spare, geometric marks and full-bleed patterns that is absolutely perfect to us. The only problem with the pieces she made for Parrish was their ever-so-slightly out-of-reach price tag. So it was with great excitement that we stumbled upon Moretti's latest edition — a series of seven small works on paper (either 8.5 x 11" or 17 x 22") for the San Francisco–based shop and publishing house Little Paper Planes, ranging in price from $35 to $130. (Yes, we already put in our order!) We're posting images from that collection here today and also excerpting a brief interview Moretti did with LPP. Read all about here, then hop on over to the shop to make these beauties yours!
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03.14.15

Saturday Selects

Week of March 9, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Three different projects that push the boundaries of glass, one photograph that suspends your belief in reality, and two books that subvert your expectations of what a book can do or be.
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03.10.15

Sight Unseen Presents

Think Big! Our First LA Pop-up, at Space 15 Twenty

If you've been following our Instagram, you know that we've been spending an awful lot of time in Los Angeles lately. Last Thursday, we finally revealed why (aside from an obvious need to escape New York's subzero temps and un-meltable snowdrifts). Our latest pop-up — and our first-ever venture in LA — opened last Thursday at Space 15 Twenty, the Los Angeles Urban Outfitters concept shop and sister store to Brooklyn's Space Ninety 8, where we hosted a similar event last fall. Called Think Big!, the pop-up is inspired by a 1980s-era Soho store of the same name, which featured scaled-up versions of everyday objects.
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03.06.15

Excerpt: Book

A Designer’s Eye: Paul Rand

If there's anyone we'd trust to put together a beautiful book of ephemera, it's JP Williams, the New York–based graphic designer whose collections — of baseball cards, of balls of twine, of Swiss office supplies, and the like — are legendary. But Williams's first book doesn't in fact catalog his own accumulations from years past but rather those of the iconic graphic designer Paul Rand, who Williams used to visit at his home before Rand's death in the late 1990s. But, Williams writes, "it was not until visiting Mrs. Rand that I discovered Mr. Rand's cache of items that he had saved from his travels. A large variety of items: packages, shopping bags, dolls, toys. So many were unfamiliar to me. As soon as I saw them I asked then and there if I could have them photographed. I asked the photographer Grant Peterson to shoot all of these items in hopes of doing a book. Well, 18 years later, here it is."
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03.01.15

Saturday Selects

Week of February 23, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: long-awaited collections from two of our favorite designers, a new exhibition and book from the doyenne of Memphis, and a serious contender for the best watering can we've ever seen.
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02.27.15

Sighted

Tekla Evelina Severin on the Urban Outfitters Blog

At last year's Milan Furniture Fair, we had an extremely rare — but kind of major — fangirl moment. It wasn't in response to some big-name Bouroullec-type designer with an installation around town or even Anna Della Russo, who you sometimes see flitting from party to party. It was a Swedish interior architect and photographer named Tekla Evelina Severin — better known on Instagram as Teklan — who we met on a lazy afternoon while exploring Venture Lambrate. Severin has hands down one of the most beautiful Instagrams around, so we were insanely excited to meet her, and even happier when this beauty of a story popped up on Urban Outfitters' blog earlier this month.
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02.25.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Barbara Kasten at the ICA Philadelphia

If Barbara Kasten’s colorful, angular compositions look as though they could have been arranged just last week by some prop stylist in Los Angeles — well, consider that a testament to Kasten’s massive, if massively underappreciated, influence. The Chicago-based artist and photographer is currently the subject of a long overdue solo exhibition at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art; Stages spans five decades of work, from fiber sculptures to cyanotype prints to set design to a brand-new, site-specific installation that plays beautifully with the ICA’s interior architecture.
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